Emotion. One day it hit me: this is what I had truly been chasing and running from my entire life. I am a feeler; a deep feeler for better or for worse.
When I was a struggling preteen and teenager I believed I would grow out of my emotions one day… that I would be able to gain control in a way that could allow me to choose what I felt. My eating disorder sought this control, unquenchably desperate for it. My drug addiction did the same.
Bulimia held tight to the unreachable end-goal emotions of perfection, inner satisfaction, and being loveable—the opposite of all I felt and believed I was. Smoking cannabis did the other half of the job. It numbed me completely from the weighty emotions plaguing me constantly, always looming below the surface and waiting to burst forth into a panic attack or out-of-control binge.
One day amid my journey of recovery with the Lord I had a revelation vital to my inner healing. I was sitting on my bed praying and writing in my journal when I was suddenly overtaken by the dark mixture of emotions I had spent my life running from. I began praying out loud, “Joy, Lord. Give me your joy and peace!”
It did not come. The dark feeling intensified. I was baffled…Why was this happening? What triggered it? My mind was instantly filled with desires of relapse: the only thing I knew to turn to when I felt so incredibly heavy and out of control.
I began pacing around my room, praying for God to alleviate my turmoil. Suddenly, I heard His whisper in my thoughts: a simple, “Sit. Sit with me.”
I was shocked and confused by this, but I did what the whisper said. I sat back down on my bed and began to write exactly what it was that I was feeling. I then laid down and did something I had never genuinely practiced before: I simply felt. I began to become encaptured in the emotions I had so long avoided: weeping, writing, weeping, laying still.
I had felt the surface of my dark emotions many times before, but did I ever truly sit with them? Dig into their roots? No. I avoided them and tried to fix them. I attempted to plaster opposite emotions over them but they festered nonetheless. I realized that God was using my emotions to reveal a part of my damaged soul that He wanted to fix…traumas He wanted to unravel. He wanted me to sort out the messiness with Him. He was waiting with open arms to begin leading me the only way out of these feelings: through them. It was a storm that needed to be weathered.
I no longer have to run to old mechanisms of coping and suppressing when I feel this way because I know God has given me His spirit which is one of power, love, and self-control (1 Tim. 1:7). If I sit with Him long enough I know the urges of relapse will pass and that new revelations about my heart and healing will appear.
For me, this is not a process that has yet come to an end. It’s one that’s become familiar: comfortably uncomfortable. But there is peace in the midst of the storm because I know God is the holder of my heart and that I’m moving in the right direction. My neural pathways of running away from my feelings go deep, so I know it will take time to find the bottom of the darkness…the root to pull out. But for now, I will sit.
I’m a deep feeler. I used to hate it, but I’ve learned to love it. It’s a gift. It’s the way Yahweh made me, the way He wove my heart together. Yes, I can experience the fullness of despair, but I can also encounter the fullness of love, joy, and peace. I can identify the slightest of shifts within my heart exactly when they happen. I can empathize deeply, experiencing others’ pain as my own. I can cry openly, and I can laugh until my stomach hurts. I get to feel everything. What an incredible gift.
So today I ask you this: What emotions are you running from? Addiction and eating disorders are behaviours stemming from some type of internal darkness. Whether you are a deep feeler like me or one that is more accustomed to numbness, there is something under the surface begging to be felt. It may be incredibly uncomfortable at first, but sit with God and begin your expedition through the storm. You are not too much to handle, and not too messy to be unwoven by His hands. There is a revelation of your situation God is waiting for you to grab a hold of… one only obtained in the sitting.
So helpful to those who are feelers and those who have yet to realize they are feelers!